Our first line of defense: Laurie Garrett, the investigative reporter who wrote two excellent (and massive!) books pertinent to current events, The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, is interviewed on responding to the threat of bioterrorism.

“Our government is buying ciprofloxacin, and we’re buying tons of it. We’re buying so much cipro that Bayer in Germany has to reopen a long-shutdown factory to accommodate the American demand. That seems to be the primary thrust of this administration’s commitment at this point.

In my book, purchasing massive quantities of ciprofloxacin is a medical response, not a public health response. The appropriate public health response, it seems to me, would be to look for the most frontline primary antibiotic that appears to be effective. As far as we can tell, the stuff that’s floating around right now in people’s envelopes is completely penicillin-susceptible. It would make a whole lot more sense and it would save hundreds of millions of dollars — not to mention you wouldn’t be breeding broad-spectrum, drug-resistant bacterial disease in millions of Americans — if you use penicillin. Why in the world are we going for the world’s most expensive, broad-spectrum, highly resistance-prone antibiotics?” Salon